Chapter 31 #2
Fast as you can!”
I didn’t think about it. I just unhooked the clasp, slid the ring off, and . . . well. No way could I throw it to him and
not miss, so I gave it to Jazmine. She underhanded it, aiming at Seb’s open hand.
He snagged it out of the air, nearly losing his grip in the process. But he shifted on the heron, foot straining for purchase
on the carved wing of the bird. And we watched as he pushed the ring into the left iris.
No one breathed.
We just waited. Watched.
Seb pressed his fingers into the heron’s eyes, making a happy noise when he finally got them into place. A dull metallic click
sounded from somewhere within the sculpture’s base.
“Get down!” Benny called.
Seb didn’t climb down gracefully. He stepped off the wing and dove for the sand, landing with a thud. His head snapped toward
the heron just in time to see what we were all witnessing.
As if it were a king on a giant chessboard, Mr. Legs slowly moved backward to reveal a small trapdoor hidden under his base.
It was a minor shock to me that the sculpture moved freely after being told all my life that it had been carved from a tree
trunk that grew on the property.
If Mabel’s letter to her daughter was right, this was the smuggler’s hole.
“Open it!” Seb said, scrambling across the sand toward us.
Heart speeding like a moving train, I glanced around the beach again, utterly paranoid, and was relieved to see that we were
still alone. We dropped to our knees in front of Mr. Legs, brushing sand away from stonework and a crude wooden door that
had been sunk inside. A single iron ring was affixed to it, and when Benny pulled it, the door creaked and complained, but
it finally swung open like the trunk of a car.
We all stared inside the hole.
Benny was the first to turn on his phone’s flashlight. And when he did, we could better see the size of it—maybe three or
four feet in diameter, a straight shaft going down into the earth. And inside the shaft was the top of wooden crate.
“We gotta pull that out,” Seb said excitedly. “Get that side of it, Benny!”
The boys reached into the hole and grabbed the sides of the crate. But try as they did, all they managed to do was grunt in
frustration.
“What the fuck is in this crate?” Seb complained. “Either it weighs a ton, or it’s wedged in there too tight.”
“Shovel?” Jazmine suggested.
My mind flew to the tools in the garage. “Crowbar?”
Seb pointed at me. I raced around the cottage and retrieved both a shovel and an old crowbar from the garage, and when I raced
back to the hole, Seb and Jazmine took turns trying to crack open the crate. It didn’t seem to want to budge . . . and then
wood splintered.
“There!” Jazmine said, lifting the shovel out of the hole. “Put the crowbar right there!”
Seb stuck the crowbar inside, and with the edge of the hole as a fulcrum, used all his weight to pry the top off the crate.
Rusted nails lined the inner lid, but we avoided them and got the rest of the lid off, and Benny shined his phone’s flashlight
inside.
Packed tight as sardines in neat rows, gold bars glittered in the old wooden crate. Dozens of them. I reached inside and picked
one up, only to be shocked by the weight of it.
“Jesus! This is . . .” Seb couldn’t even finish. One by one, everyone picked up a gold bar, murmuring in amazement. “Holy
shit, guys. Are you seeing this?”
I was seeing it. I just wasn’t believing it. Not until Seb desperately pulled out more bars, trying to see how far down they went and quickly counting. “There must be . . . fifty gold bars, easy. Maybe more.”
“The gold bar that was found downtown!” Jazmine said.
“Shit!” Benny said, his face lit up like Christmas with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on him. “The news said that bar was
worth thirty thousand. Fifty times thirty thousand . . .”
“Wags,” Seb said, looking around at all our faces. “There’s more than a million inside here. We’re fucking millionaires!”
Nervous laughter erupted, as well as dismissals of Seb’s claim. It can’t be. This isn’t happening. It must be fake, another one of Mabel’s tricks.
But as we all worked together to pull out all the gold bars, loading them into a wheelbarrow and hauling them toward the back
deck, where we stacked them into some plastic totes that were left over from when I packed up Nana’s stuff. All in all, there
were forty gold bars, potentially worth more than a million.
Even splitting it four ways, it was more money than I could fathom.
When we’d removed all the gold, Seb and Benny pulled out the wooden crate that had held the bars. It was so old and damaged
from being inside the hole that the sides were rotted and crumbled in their hands. But once they’d retrieved the bottom of
the crate, we peered down in the hole to see another crate below it.
“What the hell . . . ?” Jazmine said, joy dancing in her eyes.
Like the sides of the gold-bar crate, this wood was rotten, so we made quick work of its nailed-on lid.
Once it was torn off, we peered at something wrapped in burlap.
Something that was about the size of a lamp, maybe a couple feet high.
And as Seb lifted it out with a strained grunt, Benny helping him get it over the edge of the hole, it was clear that we’d reached the bottom of the smuggler’s hole.
Seb dropped the heavy burlap sack on the nearby sand. And as my heart thudded wildly I my chest, I tore at the rotting fabric
to reveal what lay inside.
The glittering figure of a nude woman stared back at me, carved marble covered in flaking gold. Unlike the larger, armless
Venus de Milo sculpture, this little lady had all her appendages, and stood on a small hill made of seashells.
The Golden Venus.
Mabel was right. Once you’d seen it, you understood why it was so precious. All of us were lost for words. We just sat around
the gilded statue, amazed and dumbfounded.
After all these years. And everything we’d been through this summer. It felt like a dream.
I couldn’t breathe.
The statue literally stole my breath away.
“She’s beautiful,” Jaz whispered.
“Unbelievable,” Benny said.
“Is it real?” I whispered, clutching my chest. “We really found her? This isn’t a dream . . . ?”
“It’s real,” Benny said reverently. “It’s very, very real.”
“Nana Malone wanted us to find it when she gave us those Blackbeard rings,” Seb said, looking at me with happy tears shining
in his eyes.
The realization was a potent one. Nana had trusted us, even as kids, not to lose the vintage Blackbeard rings, just like she
trusted the Neelys to look after her painting of Mr. Legs. Maybe she’d inherited Mabel’s spirit-medium talents.
Or maybe she was just a sucker for a good treasure hunt like the rest of us.
“We didn’t let her down,” I said as Seb wrapped me up in his arms and tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. “I can’t believe
it. I just can’t believe it . . .”
“Oh, I can,” Seb murmured into my hair as Jazmine’s and Benny’s shouts of victory sailed over the darkening lake behind us. “Told
you a million times, Paige. I’ve got enough faith for both of us.”